Morning in the Burned House
by Cartographical
Summary: Beckett's apartment is different now. So is Beckett. Post-ep for 7x01.


_Title stolen from a Margaret Atwood poem. Characters stolen from Castle._

* * *

Her eyes still burn.

She somehow thought his return would fix it, the chronic blur that clears for the heartbeat after she blinks only to seconds later cycle back. She'd learned to breathe through it, read through it, live through it, after the fourth day when Esposito had perched at her desk and Ryan had hovered at the board, both intently watching her for endless minutes. Even though she'd kept her eyes firmly fixed on his file, she had known, she had known suddenly, that the boys were drawn to her blink, blink, blink, her eyelashes fluttering out the seconds since his departure.

Every night she had cried instead of sleeping, cried until the tears lapsed into a helpless, listless stagnation, and she swam back to wakefulness every morning run dry – all of it run dry. It was her most fundamental ritual, the one she still can't weave into words, threads of the thought of it fluttering at the edges of her consciousness: waiting for the next blink, relishing the painful burn of appearing normal, the haze and shadow that crescendoed before that sliver of a second in which her eyelids flicked shut and the world quieted into blackness.

The burn still hasn't left, but the nausea, the sickening sway of her stomach that she thought was gone for good, has surged back now in full force.

"Don't worry about it, Castle," she rushes into the phone, her words stumbling into each other.

"I'm already here. It'll take me an extra two minutes."

Too early that morning she'd snagged her pants on a fire escape as she'd run after Leonard Goods, Leonard Goods who had run like an idiot, and she'd made the stupid, stupid, stupid mistake of complaining about it when she'd _known _that he was at a coffee shop just around the block from her apartment. "All my good pants are at the loft," she says, working on it - the pauses between the words, the regulation of each breath, the steady strain of normalcy.

"By the time I get back there your coffee'll be cold. I still have the key to your place."

"Don't," she gets out, appalled by the crack in her voice, the irregular fissures that spindle through the glass tone she's managed to keep smooth for so many months of desperate calls.

"Sorry," he says, so deliberately, so calculatingly jocular. "You're breaking up."

And then the flat silence of an ended call and the catch and crack of the burn that wants so badly to spill out through her eyes.

_If you only knew,_ she mutters as she grabs her coat and her keys and rushes toward the disaster that awaits her.

* * *

Castle's made it all the way to her bedroom by the time she gets there. His back is turned but she can just see the tense edge of his jaw, the angle of his hand over his mouth. She had prayed for months to see his face again but right now, right now she would give anything not to have him turn around.

So of course he turns around.

She can't read him – whatever's in the darkness of his pupils, in the slight hunch of his shoulders, in the tension of his fingers as he lowers his hand. She can't read the jerky jump of his eyebrows that she supposes he means to be some kind of greeting.

"Wish I could say I like what you've done with the place," he gets out. She thinks he was hoping to be funny. Maybe if she could stop crying, maybe if her tear ducts would ever fully refill then that vital knowledge of him that she'd thought was so intrinsic would flow back into her, maybe her ability to read his every soft exhalation would well up back inside her too.

It had started with her homemade murder board – tacking newspaper articles back onto the window, carefully opening the shades every night and staring at the monochrome slashes of ink until the tears finally came and she could curl into a knot in the middle of her bed and shift along the brink of half consciousness for several hours before rocketing up, aching and exhausted and shot through once again with purpose.

But there was too much – so much, so impossibly much compared to her mother's murder. And so she'd found herself reserving that space, carefully cutting the clippings that marked the passage of time – days, then weeks, then months – and taping up the excerpts to the board, staring through the mosaic of newsprint out into the dark and hopeless night.

Everything else wouldn't fit. She'd left it at the precinct until she'd seen Ryan at her desk one day, staring at the sharp strokes of her capital letters on a legal pad, his brow furrowed, his mouth moving soundlessly as he looked over the words. Page after page after page and she realized, suddenly, it was too much.

Blink once every ten seconds. Keep the legal pads at home.

His gaze keeps flicking off her, stuttering to the wall, the closet, then back to her face. "Please tell me you were at least sleeping at the loft," he finally says.

She opens her mouth, fishes for a response that is something more than an excuse.

"Never mind," he murmurs, and whatever else is laced through his tone, he doesn't sound angry. "Don't know why I asked."

He should be furious, she thinks, turning to see what he sees, stepping back and pushing out a breath and taking in the wall nearest her bed, a montage of images, his walk to that dumpster captured and frozen again and again into a hundred singular moments in time, the bleak tan of his jacket in so many different milliseconds coalescing into a stuttering, pixilated capture of his movement.

She wishes that were the worst of it.

With her mother it had been index cards, more manageable, more contained. The yellow papers flutter when she walks by them, ruffle in the breeze of any breath, whisper her out of sleep when a too-brisk wind whisks through the window. They're everywhere, patterns of places that she kept reweaving, changing a piece here, a paper there, her own inscrutable map of the world. Somehow Russia had shifted next to those pictures of him, unwavering capital letters that swing seamlessly between Russian and English words.

She realizes she hasn't said anything.

"I know it seems like a violation," she murmurs. She remembers walking into Scott Dunn's house, seeing iteration after iteration of her face plastered onto the walls, a horrifying tangle of words and images. The papers flutter reproachfully – a stark line of Cyrillic in the corner nudged up next to the broken notes of her too-fast conversation with an air-traffic controller, blunt underlined letters next to those pictures of him, the pictures that together blur into the motion of his walk, the confident cocky stride of his that she had known so very well -

The hand on her shoulder makes her suck in a breath, whirl violently with a fist clenched and half raised before she can check herself.

He's watching only her now.

"A violation," he echoes.

She feels a far-away ache in her knuckles, realizes her fist is still clenched. Relaxes her fingers. Exhales slowly. Blinks. "A little too like more than one murderer we've known," she elaborates with a plastered smile and a half shrug.

"Kate."

She has nothing. It's not that it's creepy, it's not that it's a violation – it's just damning. She'd ignored Burke's phone calls and Martha's attempts to have her over for dinner and she'd buried herself, held herself carefully together in public and come back only to the loft for scattered handfuls of hours to keep flinging herself hopelessly, helplessly against the wall of his disappearance.

He's still just watching her, watching her with a quiet and careful and wary regard that she hasn't seen from him in so very long.

"I would have had to buy a bigger apartment eventually," she mutters, still working to dispel the crackling and grief-filled tension, but then he's stepping into her and his hands are burning fire over her denim-covered hipbones and she knows he hears it, the latent admission in those words, _I'd never have stopped looking, never, never have stopped looking for you._

"It could never be a violation," he rumbles, dropping his lips to her forehead so that she feels the vibration of his words through her skull, through her bones.

"Please don't make me take it down," she whispers against his throat, her words cracking. She lets the rhythm of her blinks lapse, her lashes fluttering too quickly, but it doesn't help; she's suddenly soaking him with her messy flow of grief. Those two months are still a swallowing darkness for her, an endlessness deeper than the hours that she knows he cannot possibly understand. The writer and detective in them burn for the mystery of it, but she also feels it in her bones, the need to know what happened, in the choke in her throat as she swallows her morning coffee and the sting in her too-dry eyes from the tears that still streak her cheeks every night.

"You can't come back alone," he says. He leans back and her heart stumbles before she feels his lips on her forehead, the incantation he murmurs against her skin. "You can leave it up, but together, now, we'll only come together, we'll only ever be back here together."

She draws away, tilts her face up to his. She'd kicked her heels off at the entrance, she only know realizes, some vestige of her old life surfaced back again. Two months and she'd never taken them off until she finally curled into her mattress, but now there is some part of her, even just the instinctive motion of her feet, that accepts that he's back. He closes the distance between them, his lips dry and chapped – still chapped – against hers, and though the salt of her tears must burn he only presses himself into her more insistently.

Her hands trip along the loops of his belt, the fabric too smooth under her callused fingertips, but he hums a protest against her, his palms pressed hard on her hips but his kiss still soft. "Crying's not a turn on, Beckett," he rumbles against her lips.

She smiles despite herself, tears still streaking her face but the feel of some far-away happiness deep, deep in her chest. "Not what you said last night."

His runs his fingers through her shortened hair. He still hasn't said anything about it, but she finds him touching it again and again, his movement stuttering at the end of it as he remaps the changed landscape of her. "Last night we weren't in a creepy serial killer apartment." He finally draws back, steps away, and she feels his vision of her again, her tears and the paper and picture-lined walls and the desperate grief of the place that might never leach out of the air.

She gulps a breath, works to cobble herself back together – familiar work, running to rein in the pieces of herself that start to crumble out. Inhale, exhale, the press of her index finger into her palm, the burn of the tears that she corrals back into herself.

"I love that you're so impossibly relentless," he says. "I – makes sense that it's been two months, since I know I had my vows memorized and they're gone now, but I remember that. The phrase echoing in my head as I drove – how impossibly relentless you are, how fervent, how the burn of your passion ignites everyone around you and just – makes everything so much brighter."

She stares, eyes still burning, heart knocking gratefully, so damn gratefully against her ribs. "You make me brighter," she whispers, stepping into him, lips to lips and hands to hands and a sudden surge of such a different kind of burning singing through her blood.


End file.
